Is God a being among beings or Being Itself? An Exchange with Dale Tuggy

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4 responses to “Is God a being among beings or Being Itself? An Exchange with Dale Tuggy”

1. 

   Anthony Flood

   June 19, 2025

   Tuggy has debated my favorite (living) Reformed apologist, James R. White, on Jesus’ divine identity. You might find your fellow Arizonan’s interaction with him interesting. Yes, it takes more time to listen and watch than to read, but there’s nothing like a cross-ex to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of a position. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOHfivnaw-g

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2. 

   BV

   June 22, 2025

   Tuggy is not a fellow Zone Man. His in-laws for a time lived near Tucson, and when he visited them, he would visit me for relief from them and philosophical refreshment from me. We first met at a Greek Orthodox monastery in the desert a bit south of Florence, AZ, at the end of — wait for it — Paisano Road.
   Cross examination?
   Thanks for the link. Will take a look.

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3. 

   Tom T.

   July 4, 2025

   From the substack: >> … there may be a way forward via the analogia entis.<< I am late to the game, as usual. However, I read a bit on the analogia entis you mentioned (in Wikipedia!?!) and didn't get much more on it than a general Thomistic analogy theory, which posits explicitly that the properties of God are only analogies to human properties that give us some sense of God but do not reach into his real being. Fundamentally, what this theory does is preserve the transcendence of God, while allowing some space for human reasoning to relate this unknowable God to our human circumstances. As such, I don't think this resolves the aporia between you and Dale. God's transcendence is the sticking point; you affirm it and Dale does not. That "God is a being among beings" is a statement that reduces God to an immanent object that is fully capable of rendition into human logic and discursive concepts and properties. Such a God is intellectually relatable, and one in which we can draw many conclusions as to who and what God is and what we are to do in this world. A transcendent God, however, presents a conceptual problem. The analogical words for a transcendent God's properties simply do not mean the same thing as their normal, logical sense, and cannot be made to mean anything that "the discursive intellect [can] process." God is Wisdom, but not like man's wisdom; God is Existence, but not like man's existence; etc. God's properties are understood in this way as the negative of concrete human concepts, and there is no corresponding logical rendition of what God's properties are in themselves. Even your formulation, that "God is identical to self-existent Existence," only works as an intended description of a transcendent God if the words are emptied of any normal meaning in the time bound world of human existence. Which is precisely Dale's point. However, as reasonable as Dale's position is, the aporia still stands. Logic is downstream from metaphysics, and there is no independent warrant for preferring a human scale metaphysical framework that dictates "God is a being among beings" to a transcendent metaphysics in which it is proper to say that "God is identical to self-existent Existence." In the latter case, it is not illogical that we do not have univocal human terms to describe such a God and his properties and must use ambivalent analogies, metaphors, or contradictions of the logic of human existence like Bill's formulation. It is simply a logical and therefore reasonable result of positing God's transcendence to his creation and all such human conceptual reasoning.

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4. 

   BV

   July 5, 2025

   Thanks for the comment, Tom.
   I would read Tuggy a bit more charitably. He affirms divine transcendence; it’s just that he thinks it can be accommodated by ascribing to God attributes that no other being has or could have.
   >>Even your formulation, that “God is identical to self-existent Existence,” only works as an intended description of a transcendent God if the words are emptied of any normal meaning in the time bound world of human existence. << I don't intend it as a description, and it admittedly 'does not compute' in terms of the discursive intellect. Just as there are limit concepts, there are forms of speech that mark and point beyond limits. Point where? Into the Mystical, into the Ineffable. Divine Simplicity is a doctrine that gestures in the direction of a mystical experience that cannot be made sense of in discursive terms. Philosophy begins in wonder, develops its content via a series of aporiai, and ends in Silence. Trinity and Incarnation and DDS make no logical sense to Dale. They don't make any logical sense to me either. I interpret them as Christian koans; Dale doesn't. So, naturally, he denies the Trinity and the divinity of Jesus. Your concluding paragraph is very perceptive. In fact, it is a good representation of my position. The arguments to DDS are very strong and convince me. But the conclusion, namely, DDS, make no logical sense (despite all the fancy footwork that trirs to make sense of it). So I say: just as we transcend the sensible toward the ration, we must transcende the ratioal to the trans- or suprarational. If you deny that that is possible, you are just a dogmatist, and I will demand proof that the final transcending is impossible. All you can then do is go presuppositionalist on me by begging the question and presupposing the ultimate hegemony of the Discursive Framework, as I call it. Dale and Co. won't buy it. He is no less intelligent than I am. So it's not about IQ or clarity/rigor of thinking. It's a question of whether or not you have been vouchsafed a Glimpse beyond the veil.

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